


Polymorphic Code

by Eligh



Series: I Fix Your Shit [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: AI Rights, AI!Phil, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Artificial Intelligence, Character Study, Comic Book Science, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-21
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-05-22 12:16:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6078987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eligh/pseuds/Eligh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Phil catches a cold and then ignores it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Polymorphic Code

**Author's Note:**

> Short in-universe blurb examining Phil's backstory and how he, an AI construct living in a world without much in the way of tech support, thinks.

It has been just a little over three years since the AI inhabiting the last C0ULS0N model chassis to survive the firestorm that was New York wandered up Boulder Canyon, following a ping deep in his circuits that promised non-natural electrical output just outside Boulder city limits.

That the output was manmade rather than botmade had been an initial disappointment, but the C0UL50N was by this point used to this sort of frustration. He had thus far in his short but eventful life not once been able to grasp hold to many of the things he’d wanted, so, masking his resignation when facing off with a miniscule band of defensive humans, he’d pulled the name of his favorite Shield programmer from the recesses of his vaguely damaged memory logs and forced a smile.

Humans liked to put names to faces, so he’d eschewed his original—rather unimaginative—name and told the Shield Agent that he’d stumbled across to call him Phil.

The Agent himself—back in those first days, but not now, not when Phil has something to say about it—was muscled but still slightly malnourished, with haunted, tired eyes. He was codenamed Hawkeye, a name that had pinged faint circuits of overwritten ops logs. Phil’d noted it with little interest; a hint of déjà vu had produced a detached sort of recognition. Idly, he’d created a file path, telling himself that he would investigate later.

Then the day of discovery had continued with the introduction of one Tony Stark, who had soldered Phil’s torn circuits together despite faint tremors running sporadically through human hands, and one Bruce Banner, who had frowned mistrustfully but ended the day arguing good-naturedly about the artificial synthaskin that made up Phil’s waterproof exterior. A simple directory Search had informed Phil that both men were civilian contractors, all other information redacted. He was no stranger to black ops work, so that redaction wasn’t troubling.

After the largely cosmetic fix—which would have admittedly resulted in eventual system shutdown, but not for months beyond what Phil would have allowed—Phil’d spent the evening with nothing more to do that divide his attention between making nice with the humans and running elaborate recovery programs relating to Clint Barton. Incongruous to his general disinterest in human affairs, he’d found that he was oddly pleased when his files regarding his ex-Agent were restored in full, not that the heavily-censored ops files had much by way of information.

It was a connection in the darkness, though, and one that Phil hadn’t even been aware he’d been seeking.

Looking back now, he’s embarrassed by his initial disappointment when first coming to the I Fix Your Shit House, but he’s bolstered by the fact that at the end of that first night, the smiles he was sending the three humans were far from forced, especially when in the context of ‘Clint.’

It was portentous, those honest smiles, but Phil wouldn’t realize that until later. A great deal of the years following that night had been spent thinking about those humans. Phil would be lying, though, if he said he allocated equal space in his memory banks to all three. 

He used to be more impartial; was in fact written that way, and for the first several years of his existence couldn’t imagine being any other way.

When first consciousness was achieved, the AI named agent.exe was at the very peak of his field. He’d been written on the backs of his predecessors, tweaked to fit a very specific set of criteria, and there was nothing and no one like him anywhere else in the world.

Besides being the very best at what he’d been written to do, he also enjoyed his awakened life, his off duty life, his time spent non-corporeally. He liked the feeling of flicking though satellite relays and down hard lines, and especially loved the pleasurable itch of squeezing his code down pathways meant for much less sentient programming. The shock and awe of an overwrite on malware, the surge of a job well done: there was nothing like it.

Still, his extracurriculars paled in comparison to how useful he could be as a voice in the ear of his agents, fighting on the side of good. But after a few years of usefulness, he, as many sentient beings can, began to feel restless.

The news of a chassis in development that could hold the entirety of his program was very enticing, made more so by the fact that there were several bodies in production. This meant that agent.exe could, eventually, connect to a network of himselfs, and could learn and grow that much faster. And he could be on the ground in multiple locations, experiencing new things and living, not in the cloud, but in the world.

And so the C0UL50N-model chassis was born. A complete, bug-free, perfectly ideal version of agent.exe was uploaded as a trial into a highly refined physical body, with careful copies of his program stored and dormant in Shield’s servers in New York, at NORAD, and with the UN’s peacekeeping division. Those copies were later destroyed in the final confrontations of the war, but agent.exe would only start to notice the loss of small bits of potential much further down the line. But for then, in that first body, for the mere month he had as a physical being before it all went to shit, everything was wonderful.

Touching things became his favorite pastime. Discreetly, as one does, because he wasn’t one of the bouncy, enthusiastic Service bots that tooled around getting into trouble at Shield Headquarters, and nor was he one of the rudimentary Process AIs that filed paperwork and assigned missions. But agent.exe once spent an afternoon at the Hub’s cantina, his shiny new hands buried in sticky bread dough, simply marveling at the texture between his fingers.

And while the chassis C0UL50N.001.1 combined with agent.exe could take delight in the minutia of day-to-deal real life, and was a unit designed to do many things—the whole, there, was the greater than the sum of its parts—developing personal relationships and cultivating friends was not one of those end goals.

The Artificial Intelligence Rights and Independence Act—passed five years before agent.exe was even a gleam in a programmer’s eye—guaranteed that he was written with the right to autonomy, to choose his own work, housing, chassis (if available), sexual and gender orientation, hobbies, preference for off-work pastimes, everything—but there were ways around even such  fundamental laws.

Robots—and yes, AI too, though some tree-hugging humans and most actual AI take offence at this designation—are, according to general human thinking, little more than highly advanced tools. Therefore, agent.exe been programmed with various preferences in mind from the very beginning. What with being a military-designated bot, he was inclined to be utterly useful: helpful and ruthless, precise and merciless. His expansive mind overflowed with a wealth of military strategy, unerring paths to diplomacy, and efficient conflict resolution. He was a leader, a situation manager, a supervising officer, a thinking, analytical, conflict-resolution literal machine.

One thing he was _not_ designed to be was a companion, and this is why, after all the life he’d led so far, a random decision to walk up an innocuous road leading to a run-down house and the men he currently called his family, was so curious. Specifically, if he was to put a label on it—and he was wont to, as a logical sort of construct—the curiosity centered around his immediate fascination with everything filed away in the exponentially growing file path labeled ‘Clint Barton.’

At first, he’d assumed that his infatuation with his ex-Agent was a glitch. Some nonrepeating decimal in his processers that was simply _there_ and constantly running. An itch, if you will. And there was precedent: a failed mission several years prior had resulted in the wiped loss of one of the field bots that had been recently under his control. He’d been called off the mission hours beforehand to focus his expansive mind elsewhere, and the fallout was catastrophic. The bot had been wiped, the human support had nearly gone AWOL, and agent.exe had been inconsolable for days, at least until his programmers had ferreted out and overwritten the issue.

Empathy grew sometimes in the more advanced AI, and so it was a usual sort of procedure to occasionally… cut it out.

But Phil’s Shield programmers weren’t around anymore, so he would have to live with the glitch, live with the warm feeling of connectedness he got when Clint would smile that easy smile of his, or innocently impart an anecdote about a bot friend back in basic, or snap at Stark when Stark’s various experiments on Phil’s person became too invasive, or make an extra-strong cup of oolong simply because he knew that Phil liked the smell.

Slowly, and without any definite timestamp to mark the beginning of this phenomenon, Phil began to dislike thinking of this apparent ‘friendship’ affection as a glitch. And after a while, by the time ‘affection’ began to be even too pale a descriptor, Phil’d settled so firmly into his new life, his non-military life, his just-living-a-life life, that he couldn’t imagine a time when all he’d thought about were objectives and outcomes and the black and white of warfare strategy.

Once—only once, because Stark can be… aggravating—Phil’d voiced vague concerns over his mental processes changing without his consent. Stark had barely glanced up from where he’d been shoulder-deep in the engine block of the cherry red corvette that apparently served no other purpose than for Stark to dis- and reassemble it over and over. He’d scoffed, wrench clasped unhygienically in his teeth, dismissing Phil’s fears as ‘baseless’ and ‘narrow’ and didn’t Phil realize that change was the beauty of life? Of course he would grow with the environment; he was alive, wasn’t he? Isn’t that what bird-brain was always arguing?

It was an acceptable answer, even if Stark’s delivery method left something to be desired.

And then, when a few months further on into their acquaintance, Phil’d experienced the happy accident that allowed him to overwrite his own programs and give himself true power of choice—something that had been so far out of his realm of possibility that he’d never even considered imagining it—he’d embraced the change that allowed him his happiness with open arms, and thanked whatever nameless gods (that he was still disinclined to believe in, because AI constructs have _met_ their creators) that he’d been given this chance.

That he’d been allowed to grow, and to learn, and to love Clint.

But still, this—this happiness, this contentment—this is not what he was originally designed for. And so on dark nights, when he stretches out his circuits and listens to the quietly organic darkness of the world he now inhabits, he sometimes wonders if the metaphorical ball is ever going to drop.

~

The humans are out, Bruce having successfully cajoled Stark into a trip westward up the canyon to the tiny town of Nederland. Apparently there is a gear-driven carousel that resides there, complete with hand-carved wooden animals, and Bruce insisted that they all should see it. Stark’d been intrigued by the mechanics of the thing and Clint had looked worryingly interested in the possibility of pilfering a carved ostrich, but Phil was aching for some peace and quiet and so had begged off the trip, at least for this time.

Clint had given him a quick kiss on the cheek and imparted quietly that he didn’t blame him; Stark had hooked Phil up to a monitor the day before and poked around his code, and while he didn’t change anything around (this time) having Stark fiddle with his programming always left Phil feeling twitchy. 

So it’s just Phil and Lucky and Dum-E and Lola, puttering at their own devices around the property. Phil’s pulled Lola into the dirt patch that serves as a driveway in front of the garage and popped her hood while Dum-E (newly mobile on repurposed tank treads) and Lucky circle them, amused and tittering and basically being nuisances.

“Now, what did he do to you this time,” Phil muses softly as he activates his wireless and reaches out to the car. Lola doesn’t quite qualify as AI, though she’s equipped with predictive mapping and rudimentary Service. She could drive herself in a pinch, though Stark’s sworn up and down not to let her; he apparently found her under less-than-optimal circumstances and doesn’t trust her GPS. Doesn’t stop him from wanting to put anti-grav tech on her, though, the absolute idiot.

Phil closes his eyes and connects her to his internal network, leaning over her engine and running his fingers along her pistons. They’re newer, far more powerful than stock, and perfectly capable of running the anti-grav if Phil can’t talk Stark out of it. That’s good; he doesn’t want to see this beautiful girl crash on account of an underpowered engine.  Moving on, he accesses her specs with a smile, noting the various places Tony’s modified code or made other upgrades. And, well, it’s not all that surprising he likes being able to do this: AI has a long and complicated history with smart devices, and Phil’s always been partial to cars.

Of course, this is when Dum-E crowds onto Phil’s network and insinuates something about Phil’s compensation techniques, to which Phil responds with a raised eyebrow and sneak of a redundant feedback loop that locks Dum-E’s arm straight in the air at his maximum extension. Dum-E protests this action vehemently while remaining absolutely still, lest he tip himself, and Phil blows out an all-too-human sigh as he turns his attention back to his favorite girl.

He frowns, momentarily arrested by an itch at the back of his circuits. There’s something… odd. In her coding. Phil concentrates and circles it—a string of commands that don’t make sense. They’re unconnected to anything maintenance-related, have nothing to do with positioning, don’t even have a correlation with things as miniscule as preset seat positions.

Phil shrugs and moves on because they serve no purpose. They’re probably something Stark wrote as practice. Junk programming. Either Stark, that is, or maybe a vanity project from her original owner.

He goes back to her engine block, but then jolts when she shocks him as he makes contact with her metal, electric build up. “Hey,” he murmurs. “That wasn’t nice.” Still connected to her wirelessly, Phil’s subsumed by a faint feeling of playful amusement, tinged by a hint of contrition. “Oh, you’re forgiven,” he says, and then reaches up, catching the edge of her hood and clicking it back down into place. “What do you say to a bath?” he asks her, and then goes to hook up the hose to the water tank.

~

That night, lying in bed with Clint sprawled exhausted and sweaty across his chest, Phil has to initiate sleep procedures twice before he successfully powers down. _That’s odd_ , he thinks as he slips into power save, and in the morning, roused by one of Clint’s sharp elbows to his side, he doesn’t remember a thing.

~

“Ooh, gimme,” Stark says, his hands reaching, and Phil’s head tics as he disObeys and holds the steaming fresh batch of cornbread out of his reach.

“No,” he admonishes him. “Clint said this was for dinner. Besides, you’ll burn yourself. It just came out of the oven.”

Stark blinks. “Like, _just_ just? Why aren’t you using oven mitts?”

Phil startles and looks down, and what the hell, Stark’s right. He hadn’t put on mitts before grabbing the pan, and the synthaskin on his palms is bright red and about two degrees away from starting to smoke. “Shit,” he says, and drops the pan on the stovetop, already inspecting the damage. “I—what?”

“Hey, chill,” Stark says, coming over to him and grabbing his hands. Phil almost pulls away, but Stark’s face is set and concerned, frowning slightly as he rotates Phil’s wrists, inspecting his palms. “Not irreversible, but yeah, that’s not gonna be great. You burned right through to the metal by your thumbs.”

Phil looks at him, utterly flummoxed. “It’ll…”

“Grow back, yeah, I know,” Stark says flippantly. “But in the meantime, wrap ‘em up. I’ve got some fixit goop we can stick on the worst bits that’ll help your skin not crack and tear. You not have your pain receptors turned on or something?”

“Or something,” Phil says faintly, staring down at his hands. He has no idea what he was thinking. He’s never made a mistake like this before.

“Hey, everyone fucks up sometimes,” Stark says, and when Phil looks back up, he’s smiling reassuringly, and is clear-eyed and lucid. “I mean,” he continues, now smirking, “bots don’t _usually_ screw up a simple Service…”

“I will tase you,” Phil deadpans, feeling a little bit more on point with the familiar sniping. He must have just turned off his receptors for some reason and then forgot to turn them back on. It’s a simple mistake.

Stark clutches dramatically at his chest. “Oppression!” he cries. “Skynet!”

Phil shakes his head, amused. “Shut up, Tony.”

~

“Hey, hand me that screwdriver, willya?” Clint asks from where he’s half-buried under the smoke shack in the backyard. He and Phil have taken it upon themselves to replace the flooring, and Clint’s got various nebulous reinforcement schemas in his head. He’s waved off Phil’s requests for clarification with ‘don’t worry, I got it’ and ‘I’m just gonna go with what works, y’know?’ which is more aggravating than perhaps Clint realizes. Phil lets him get away with it, though, and not solely because watching the pull of Clint’s pants over his ass as he crawls under the shack is diverting.

Phil leans over and fishes through the toolbox, emerging with a Phillips-head screwdriver that he hands over handle-first. Clint grunts his thanks and Phil makes to lean back, but suddenly finds that he cannot.

He’s frozen, his biomech muscles locked in rigor as he fires rapid commands but he can’t move and what on earth—

“Hey,” Clint says, sitting up with dust on his face and his brow furrowed in confusion. “Phil, you okay?”

Phil breaks through the freeze with a full-body twitch; his surroundings are suddenly lit with a blaze of blue that retreats just as quickly. Clint leans forward and touches his face, truly worried now. Phil can read the uptick of his pulse under his skin, taste the flare of adrenaline with the sensors built into his lips.

“I’m fine,” Phil says, which is not true. Clint doesn’t look like he believes him, but Phil just affects a breath and smiles, and reaches out with a proffered wrench. “Your floor’s collapsing.”

Clint looks around at the smokeshack with alarm, diving back to the support beams, swearing. Phil, meanwhile, divides his attention, half paying attention to Clint’s increasingly aggravated protestations, half running a systems diagnostic.

He can’t find anything out of place, and so—reluctantly, so reluctantly—chocks it up to a physical malfunction. It’s been humid recently. He’ll take some extra care when cleaning his joints next time. That must have been it.

~

“Can you run some equations for me?” Bruce asks, sauntering up to where Phil’s methodically plucking the feathers from tonight’s dinner at a workbench set up outside the (now lopsided, but functional) smokehouse. “I did them myself, but I’d like you to take a look, just double checking.” He smiles self-depreciatingly. “You’re a bit more effective when it comes to the math, sometimes, and I really don’t want to have to deal with the wiring for the waterwheel twice.”

Phil wipes his hands off on his jeans and then blinks when Bruce hands him a sheaf of papers rather than a thumb drive. “Hard copy?” he asks, smiling incredulously at Bruce’s shrug.

“I’ve been trying to make do without as many devices,” Bruce explains. “We’re not going to have power forever—or at least, we’ll have to start making do with less output soon. Using a tablet seems like a waste of electricity, so I’m getting used to paper and pencil again.”

“That’s…” Phil trails off, touched by Bruce’s thoughtfulness. It’s true, and while Phil’s at least able to supplement his power by making use of the few solar cells scattered over his skin, he’s started shutting down every night to conserve energy while Clint sleeps. “That makes sense.”

Bruce shrugs again. “Well. Um. Yeah, so please look at those?”

“Of course,” Phil says. “I’ll just…” but when he focuses down on the paper, there’s an odd, off feeling, like pressure buildup behind his eyes’ cameras. He frowns, trying to focus, but the text swims, clear one moment and blurry the next. He can’t scan a thing.

“You okay?” Bruce asks, leaning forward and peering into Phil’s eyes. “You’re not focusing, is there something wrong with your eyes? Should I get Clint? Or Tony?”

“No,” Phil says quickly. “No, I’m fine. I just need to reboot something, hold on…” He fires off a command, doing a quick hard shutdown of his ocular systems. Thirty seconds later he’s powering them back up, and when he looks down again, Bruce’s penmanship is clear, scratched out in neat, spiky handwriting in even lines across the sheets of paper. “There we go,” he says, though Bruce looks apprehensive.

“Has that been happening recently?” he asks, clear worry in his voice.

No, not visual systems specifically, though the other problems are mounting. Phil ducks his head. “No. It’s just wear and tear,” he says, affecting a smile. “Sometimes you just have to turn it off and then turn it back on.”

“Right,” Bruce says, clearly still unconvinced. “Well, maybe you should—”

“These look mostly fine,” Phil interrupts, scanning quickly though the papers. “Except, here, look—” and he points out a missed decimal in a particularly lengthy equation.

“Oh, hm,” Bruce says, taking the papers back. It’s enough to derail his concern over Phil’s lapse, fortunately. “I should have seen that. Thanks.” And then he wanders off, unearthing a stub of a pencil from somewhere in his wildly curling hair and going to work rewriting.

Phil watches him go, but then restarts his eyes again, rebooting them once more for good measure before he turns back to plucking tonight’s chicken. The log of glitches he’d reluctantly created a few days ago was now clocking in with dozens of small entries. He’ll have to deal with the problem soon.

His attention’s caught when Clint appears around the corner of the house, his shirt lifted up to wipe his face of sweat and revealing his abs. “Hey,” Clint says, (sadly) dropping his shirt and hiding his golden skin from view. His pleased smile more than makes up for it, though. “I haven’t seen you all day. What’re you up to?”

“Dinner,” Phil says, gesturing to the pile of feathers that surrounds him. “Though I might be persuaded to find some other form of diversion.” Clint’s smile turns wicked, and Phil pushes the thought of the dealing with any glitches far to the back of his mind.

~

Phil’s stuck.

He flexes his hands and swears softly, but then jerks forward and picks up the screwdriver he’s been caught on again.

It’s late and he’s alone in the workshop; Clint’d begged off for bed hours ago, yawning and soft and affectionate. He’d told Phil that he didn’t mind if Phil’d stayed up to gossip with the other bots, and at first everything’d gone to plan.

But then Phil’d realized that the house’s blender was lying in disassembled pieces on Stark’s cluttered workbench, and feeling magnanimous—and perhaps with vague anticipation of what Clint’s reaction would be if Phil greeted him with a smoothie for breakfast—he’d decided to fix it.

This decision had turned out to be somewhat of a mistake.

“Dammit,” he says, his fingers flexing helplessly around the screwdriver, and then with quick, efficient movements he disassembles it again. For the twenty-third time. There’s a pause when he almost feels in control of his processers again, but then he twitches and starts the whole thing over.

“Stop,” he says to himself, but nothing’s working, he’s just moving on autopilot. And he’s not thinking clearly on top of everything else; his vision’s blurry and distorted, and he’s getting phantom proximity alerts and motion sensors, receiving impossible work orders on circuits long silent.

“Stop,” he says again, a little desperately. But he just twitches forward and pulls the blender apart once again. “Fuck!”

Behind him, Dum-E and Lucky trill, concerned.

“I don’t know,” Phil tells them, detached as he watches his hands put the blender back together again. “I must… I…”

Blue washes over his vision and he collapses down to the floor, is only saved from a problematic fall by Dum-E reaching out and catching him quickly with his armature before lowering him gently to the floor.

~

Phil resurfaces in SafeMode, which is quite possibly the most embarrassing thing to happen to an AI of his caliber in the history of recorded time.  And then he discovers, after a moment of struggle, that he cannot move. Lovely.

At least his ocular systems are functioning, if locked in place.

As if on cue, Stark pops into his field of vision, grinning like a loon. If Phil was the type of bot to startle (and if he could physically move) he might have jerked backward. As is, he attempts to psychically communicate his intense displeasure with this situation, something that is entirely lost on Stark.

“You,” Stark says instead of heeding Phil’s silent threats, “have a virus.” He points a soldering gun at Phil’s eye and tsks loudly. “What have I told you about protection?”

“Goddamn it, Tony.” Clint’s voice is welcome, as is the way he shoulders Stark out of the way, his concerned blue eyes filling every inch of Phil’s vision. His hands reached up and frame Phil’s face; they’re a distant sensation on his skin, like breath through cotton. “Baby, you’ll be okay,” Clint says. “Tony’s just about got it caught.”

“Sneaky little shit of a program,” Stark contributes from somewhere to Phil’s left. “But Bird-Brain’s right, I’m almost there. Gimme another five minutes to isolate it.”

Phil gives him ten, and then thankfully, sensation begins to return. Another fifteen and he can move, albeit a bit jerkily. “What,” he starts to ask, but is stymied when Clint’s abruptly again in his face, this time less concerned and more irate.

“You fucking asshole,” he says. Phil frowns.

“Tony found your damn ‘glitch log,’ Clint spits, raising his fingers in scare quotes. “You’ve been malfunctioning and didn’t say a goddamn thing!”

Stark disconnects a USB from Phil’s neck and closes his laptop. “That, I believe, is my cue.”

“No,” Clint tells him, raising a finger. “First tell him what the fuck his stoic shit did to him.”

Stark rolls his eyes and glances longingly through the open door that leads into the house’s kitchen. There’s the rattle of someone moving about and the smell of something sweet drifting through the doorway. Bruce, probably stress-baking.  Stark takes a breath. “Catastrophic system failure—you’re lucky Dum-E and Lucky sounded the alarm before you went into total shutdown. It was probably a slow-build booby trap set on a system less complicated than yours. You’d need high-level AI for the virus to target anything.”

Clint makes an inarticulate noise and throws his hands in the air. “The fuck, Phil!”

“What I don’t understand,” Stark says, scrubbing his fingers through his scraggly beard, is where you picked it up. I didn’t see anything the last time I hooked you up to my monitors.”

“Lola,” Phil says after a moment of searching his memory files. “I connected to her wireless the day you all went up to Nederland. There was a weird junk code that popped up—”

“Are you—” Stark’s eyes go wide.  “Are you fucking serious? Okay, one,” he sticks a finger in Phil’s face. “You don’t just go clicking on goddamn _popups_ Phil, that’s like having unprotected sex with the entirety of North America.”

“I didn’t click—” Phil protests, but Stark cuts him off.

“And two—” second finger in the face, and that’s a touch irritating “—Lola’s got a _virus_?” He turns to the corvette and makes a noise of despair, flopping dramatically on her hood. “Baby, no!”

“Dum-E and Lucky might have it, too,” Phil offers contritely, slowly getting down off the bench where he’d woken up. “I mean, if it’s contagious. We talk wirelessly all the time.”

Stark groans inconsolably, but Clint reaches out and pulls Phil into a tight hug. “Fuck you, you fucking idiot,” he says solemnly. Phil finds that he is very confused.

In the background, Stark’s ranting about safe connections, checking sources, and, inexplicably, condom use, but Phil just focuses on Clint, and his worried blue eyes. “Are you mad at me?” Phil asks. Clint ducks his head.

“A little irritated you didn’t say anything. But more worried.” He looks away cagily. “Okay, pants-shittingly terrified. I mean, we woke up to Lucky sounding his attack alarm—and let me tell you that wasn’t pleasant, brought me right back—” he grimaces and shakes his head. “And then we get down here and you’re collapsed, fucking twitching, Phil…”

“I’m sorry,” Phil says, leaning forward and resting his forehead against Clint’s. “Clint, I’m so sorry.”

Clint’s responding smile is watery. “Twice now you’ve malfunctioned big on me.”

“I won’t do it again,” Phil promises fiercely. “I’ll be more careful.”

“Just,” Clint swallows hard. “What if there’s a problem Tony can’t fix? You’re circuits and wires and, and, well, there’s not a lot of specialists for stuff like you these days.”

Phil bobs forward and kisses him softly, letting their lips catch. “I’ll be okay. I’m no more fragile than any of you humans.”

“You know that’s not all that reassuring, right?” Clint asks, his eyes wide. Phil doesn’t answer, just pulls Clint close and tucks his messy blond head under his own chin.

~

Phil clicks a thumb drive down on the table in front of Clint, and Clint jerks, startled out of his thousand-yard stare into his oatmeal. “Whassat?” he asks, looking up.

“A copy of the firewall Tony and I spent the last week designing,” Phil tells him. “No more getting sick.”

Clint’s face smoothes over in understanding and he picks up the drive. “Thanks, Phil,” he says softly. “This means a lot.”

Phil pulls out a chair and sits down. “It’s not perfect, Clint. I mean, it will take something close to a miracle to infect me again, but that doesn’t preclude something else from happening. But for that matter, can I just point out that there’s no certainty for any of us? We’re doing well here, but I—” He looks down. “I have catalogued the possibilities of so many negative outcomes. You have a fifty-seven and change percent chance of breaking a bone the next time you go hunting. You could develop sepsis, get bit by a rabid squirrel, fall in the creek, eat the wrong mushroom, not cook your meat enough. Hell, you could catch a cold that turns pneumonic. Clint—” he reaches out and grasps Clint’s hands, unsure of what to say.

This virus shook him, made the danger of this post-world they live in that much more concrete.

“You’re gonna outlive me,” Clint says softly. “Fact of life, Phil. And maybe I’m a selfish shit, but I don’t want you doing something dumb and checking out before me.”

“And I want you to live a long, healthy life,” Phil agrees.

“So we’ll both be careful,” Clint says. “I can live with that.”

“Okay,” Phil says. “Being careful.” He loves this human so much—sometimes it’s still like he’s living in a fairy tale. Five years ago he never could have even thought that this could be his life.

He’s grateful.

They sit together for a moment in silence and then Clint cocks his head, inspecting Phil’s face. “I have an idea.”

Phil raises an eyebrow. “Yes?”

“There’s this old human custom,” Clint drawls, a smirk creeping onto his face. “A celebration of sorts. Of a clean bill of health.”

Phil’s not sure where he’s going with this. “Okay…”

Clint leans back in his chair. “And by ‘celebration’ I mean of the ‘filthy debaucherous sexing’ type.”

Phil flexes his fingers, letting his sight blue for a moment, reading the dopamine rush and arousal through Clint’s skin. “Well far be it from me to stand in the way of old human customs,” he says, and Clint grins.

 


End file.
